Editorial: Gangs, guns a cancer that must not metastasize

Wednesday

Sep 30, 2009 at 12:01 AMSep 30, 2009 at 2:58 PM

It's not exactly an unfamiliar scenario anymore: Young people gather after word gets out that something's happening somewhere, tempers flare over something stupid, fists fly or somebody grabs the first thing they can find for a weapon or pulls a gun, people panic and run for their lives, some of them get hurt.

It's not exactly an unfamiliar scenario anymore: Young people gather after word gets out that something's happening somewhere, tempers flare over something stupid, fists fly or somebody grabs the first thing they can find for a weapon or pulls a gun, people panic and run for their lives, some of them get hurt.

Sometimes one of them dies, as 16-year-old Derrion Albert of Chicago did last Thursday when dozens of teenage boys, described in newspaper reports as gang members, beat the Fenger High School honor roll student to death near a South Side community center with their fists, feet, a railroad tie and 2-by-4s. Reportedly Albert had done nothing to bring on the attack; he was just there, coming home from school, when the fighting broke out, for whatever reason.

Four young men have been arrested and charged with first-degree murder. Graphic video of the incident, which may very well end up convicting them, is nothing if not disturbing.

Those things happen in a big city like Chicago, of course, but that's a little too smug. Unfortunately, we've begun to witness more of it here, too, and it's spreading.

It's a wonder no one was killed or critically injured Saturday night at a privately owned and managed student apartment complex on the East Peoria campus of Illinois Central College.

An ICC coed hosted a party at the WoodView Commons, a 330-bed student residential facility. By the time word got out by cell phone and text message, there were up to 400 revelers. Apparently there was a dispute between rival gang members over the choice of a rap song by the DJ - talk about mindless - and soon a brawl had erupted. There were gunshots, with anecdotal reports of people being wounded, though local police have not been able to confirm the latter. In any case, at least four people were hospitalized, including one woman who was run over by a car. Seven law enforcement agencies responded. Three men have been arrested, with other suspects being sought. There may be video of what transpired.

As we said, anytime a gun is involved you run the risk of it being a coroner's case. We're relieved and thankful that did not happen here.

Yet East Peoria Police were very tight-lipped in the first 24-36 hours following this brawl - the Peoria Journal Star got the identities of the three men arrested from the Tazewell County Jail - with ICC President John Erwin providing much of the initial information as he sought to put local minds at ease, even going door-to-door at the apartment complex. Local police have been more forthcoming since.

While we appreciate the constraints on communication with an ongoing police investigation, from where we sit, students and families who live nearby have a right to know as soon as possible when shots have been fired in their neighborhood, why and whether anyone was hurt. No doubt many parents want assurances from an official source - preferably the local police department - that everything's OK. They don't want 24 hours of guessing or worrying. Clearly college officials need to be kept in the loop. This was a big deal, especially to those directly impacted, and there should have been a quicker law enforcement response to media inquiries.

That said, you don't want to overreact, either. ICC has been around for 43 years and not had anything like this before. Nonstudents were the primary problem here. ICC officials view this as an isolated incident and are taking precautions to make a repeat far more unlikely - hiring 24-7 security, training staff in crowd-control measures, enforcing some post-party consequences for the involved, perhaps supervising access to the facility. We have every confidence that ICC is a safe place.

We're comforted by the fact that ICC administrators have moved rapidly to get a grip on all this. In Chicago, many kids have long expressed fears about going to school and some parents pulled their teens out of Fenger altogether this week. Social workers worry that too many children have become so accustomed to gunplay and violence that they view it as normal. Chicago Mayor Richard Daley spoke of "the violence that is taking a whole generation of young people from us."

That's the bigger issue here. Gangs and guns are a disease that, left untreated, kills kids and families, neighborhoods and communities just as surely as a cancer forms and metastasizes. How do we immunize against that?

As always it starts with parents who have some idea of what parenting means, but it also involves a surrounding community that simply refuses to shrug off incidents like this one. This is never the way it has to be.

Peoria Journal Star

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